


Even for a Lung

by VespidaeQueen



Series: Simulate Hearts [1]
Category: Fallout 4
Genre: Gen, Pre-Relationship, Reunions, Sleeping arrangements, Unlikely Valentine
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-12
Updated: 2016-02-12
Packaged: 2018-05-19 19:57:14
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,680
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5979283
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/VespidaeQueen/pseuds/VespidaeQueen
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She arrives back in Diamond City in the dead of night with a newly rescued detective, and all she really wants to do (other than get a start on finding her son) is find someplace to sleep.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Even for a Lung

**Author's Note:**

  * For [RedSummerRose](https://archiveofourown.org/users/RedSummerRose/gifts).



> Written from the prompt "things you said when you thought I was asleep."

She’s pretty much dead on her feet when they get back to Diamond City, the sort of blinding, stumbling exhaustion that only sheer force of will and a hell of a lot of adrenaline has managed to keep from dropping her to the ground. She feels more tired than she ever has before, and the damned Boston autumn cold is seeping into her bones in a way that is making everything infinitely _worse_.

Well. Maybe the cold is actually keeping her on her toes. If so, she’d like to offer a _thank you_  to the weather, because until she gets in through the gates of the city, she’s pretty sure falling asleep will come with the high probability of either never waking up _or_  waking up with a gun in her face.

But it’s late, when they get back. Sometime in the dead of morning. Maybe two, maybe three, she’s not sure. It’s dark and cold and sometime between entering Vault 114 and exiting it, a thick fog had crept in and turned everything into little more than indistinct, blurred outlines.

Well. It _is_  Halloween. Was. Yesterday, she thinks, but she feels like she was in the Vault forever.

Valentine leads her down the streets and into the back alleyway that houses his agency. She’s got this foggy, exhausted thought that she’d really like to know _what_ , exactly, he is, but the rest of her mind - the part that was still fully awake back when she _finally_  found him, all locked up tight inside the Vault - has come to several conclusions. The first is that, as much as she’d like to know, it’s probably rude to ask, and since Ellie didn’t mention anything it’s _probably_  one of those things that’s just commonplace nowadays. The second is that she’s _pretty_  sure she can see metal and wires inside what look like missing pieces of his face and neck, and she’s got an idea of what that means.

She’s pretty sure he’s some kind of robot. Just a robot in a trenchcoat and a fedora, who smokes.

She doesn’t know why a robot would smoke.

Or _how_. Does he have lungs? Something that emulates them? Was she imagining that she saw him inhale and exhale smoke? Why would someone give a robot lungs?

That’s actually…that’s actually the biggest question at the forefront of her fatigue-addled brain. Not the lungs bit, specifically, but the whole thing as a general sort of concept.

She doesn’t know if _any_  of that matters, of course, because she knows one important thing:

He’s going to help her find her boy. He’s going to help her find Shaun.

She stumbles into the detective agency after him; he holds the door open for her and she rather luckily avoids walking into either the door frame or him. There are lead weights in her arms, and every step feels like she’s walking through water.

“Looks like Ellie kept the place in order - going to have to make sure she gets that raise. ” Valentine says as he shuts the door behind her. It screeches on angry hinges before clunking shut. “ Ellie? _Ellie_. You here?”

It takes a moment, but then there’s the sound of footsteps on the stairs and -

Here’s the thing, about reunions. Because Aubrey _knows_ reunions. And she knows wondering if someone is dead. She knows waiting. She remembers the breathless rush of Nate lifting her off her feet and spinning her, just back from another deployment, _alive_  -

\- not dead in a freezer, _god_  -

Ellie _runs_  into the room, and she’s got this look on her face - bright, smiling, practically _glowing_ , even though it’s obvious they’ve just woken her - and she stops herself just short of Valentine.

She looks like she wants to hug him, but she doesn’t.

But still. Even then. _Even then_. Aubrey knows reunions, and this one - she doesn’t know how long they’ve worked together, but she knows that Ellie was boxing up his ties and she was _upset,_ but now she won’t have to get rid of those ties -

Ellie thought Valentine might have been dead, and now she knows he’s not, and it _shows_ , and -

There’s this weird feeling in her chest, like something’s just sort of cracked, and she feels like crying. She won’t ever be able to box up Nate’s ties.

God, she’s _so_  tired. Tired like after Shaun was born, except there’s no Shaun anymore to wake her with crying in the middle of the night.

And then Ellie turns to _her_  and she’s _so_  bright, so happy, so full of thanks - and Aubrey is so dead on her feet that she barely realizes that Ellie’s just suggested that she should be Valentine’s new partner until she hears him tell her to _slow down_.

“I’m a lawyer anyway, not a detective,” she says, and while Ellie looks somewhat startled by this, there’s this glint of determination about her. “And not to - well, look, I want to dive right into things - into this _case_ , since it’s my case, and while metaphorically I’ve said I won’t stop until I find Shaun, it’s some time in the ass end of the morning and I’m pretty sure that I’m going to fall over if I don’t get some rest soon. Is there a place where I can rent a room in this city, and is that even feasible when I have -” She mentally counts over the number of caps in her pocket. “- a very small amount of the modern currency.”

Ellie chews on her bottom lip for a moment, then lets out a breath. “There’s the Dugout,” she says, though she looks rather skeptical. “You can get a room there, but it’s - well, it will be nicer than what you can get pretty much anywhere else in the Commonwealth. I think they’re charging about ten caps a night? But -” She glances over at Valentine.

“We’ve got a spare bed here,” he says, and Aubrey blinks at him for what feels like a full minute. “It’s nothing fancy, but it should do you fine. Won’t cost you a cap, and we’ll be able to start on the case first thing in the morning.”

“That’s certainly kind of you, but you barely know me,” she says, and she’s got this feeling like the world tilting all around her. Unexpected kindness in this wasteland; she’s only just woken up to this world, but it seems rare and precious, but not always something to take at face value.

Good lord, is she honestly arguing that she _shouldn’t_  take a free roof to sleep under?

It doesn’t seem to phase Valentine, and he’s got a ready reply. “You pulled this old bucket of bolts out of a risky situation, and managed to talk us out of a confrontation with old Skinny Malone. That counts for something in my eyes; a hell of a lot more than caps. You get some sleep, and in the morning we’ll sit down and go over your case. I’m sure between you and me, we’ll start putting things together.”

He almost smiles. The creases around his mouth seem to deepen _just_  slightly.

“Thank you, Valentine,” she says, and she _thinks_  she smiles. Her mouth definitely makes an attempt; she’s afraid that it looks more like an exhausted grimace.

The bed is tucked under the stairs; Valentine is right, it’s nothing fancy at all. Better than all the rotted mattresses that she’s run across elsewhere, and it looks like someone’s taken something rough to the rungs of the beds and tried to get rid of most of the rust.

It’s _almost_ nice, and, honestly, she’s so very ready to collapse that she doesn’t even care.

When she sits, it’s like all the fatigue in her just drags her downward. It’s a chore to pull off her boots, to untangle all the bits of armor she’s got strapped to her, but she manages it. She feels bad leaving it all in a mess of a pile next to the bed, but _hell_ , she’s got no more energy.

It’s an honest surprise when she _doesn’t_  pass out the moment she lays down. It could be because the whole place smells like old smoke, or because there’s a weird lump in the middle of the battered mattress, or because her mind’s still trying to process everything that’s happened in a way that won’t really let her shut down. But an old mattress in a detective agency is better than the floor somewhere else, or sleeping in some burned out house, and though her bones and joints ache as she settles into something of a comfortable position, it’s not _too_  bad.

Her bare toes are going to freeze. She curls up into a ball beneath the surprisingly well preserved blanket and attempts to sleep.

“I thought you weren’t coming back, Nick,” she hears, just as she’s beginning to doze. It’s spoken quietly, but not whispered.

It’s not as though there are doors in the interior of the agency, after all.

“Well. Can’t say I planned on getting tied up in that vault for weeks.”

“ _Nick_.” There’s silence then, that stretches on, until Aubrey nearly things she’s slipped into sleeping. She’s not sure, even later, if what she hears was real or just odd, dreaming conversations. “Next time you go out into a death trap, please bring someone with you? I’d hate to see you get into a scrape you don’t walk away from.”

“A few more scrapes aren’t going to hurt me, Ellie.”

“ _Nick_. Just…consider what I said. About a partner. Can’t run a detective agency without a detective, after all.”

She thinks she hears him sigh. “Let’s see about closing this case about her kid, first. And then? Then we’ll see.”

Silence, again, and Aubrey’s drifting to sleep, nearly out of it, and maybe she misses it, or maybe she dreams it, but 

“Maybe it’s time I had a partner again,” she hears Valentine say, and she falls asleep to the thought that, maybe, having a partner would make this mess of a future a little brighter.


End file.
